The singular Dan McQuade passed away this week. He was just 43 years old.
He was a friend of mine, though not a close one. Just like everyone else who has ever met him, I loved his enthusiasm and sincerity and bottomless love for Philly. We didn’t get to hang out much, but every time I walk by the bar where he and his wife and I met up when they visited Toronto, years ago now, I think of how great that day was. I walk by that bar a lot.
I feel self-conscious, in this moment, about writing about Dan when I should cede the floor to people who knew him better. There are hundreds (and you should read Tom McAllister’s and Kris Liakos’ and Brian Howard’s tributes). But something that runs through all of the reminiscing—from close friends and longtime collaborators to people who read a few Defector blogs once in awhile—is that Dan loved everything so much. He loved telling people about things he loved so much. I just want to talk about that for a second.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “cringe”: being too earnest, liking something too much, looking a little goofy, failing to keep a lid on your enthusiasm, all things that get labeled cringe. Someone expressed to me recently that being seen rehearsing or practicing something was too cringe, and it must always be done with no witnesses. Being too excited about something that isn’t guaranteed is cringe. Doing something that looks silly is cringe, even if it’s learning the pieces of something that won’t look silly in the end. The list is endless and self-conscious.
All of those sins have one thing in common: someone else’s gaze. Liking something too much isn’t cringe in itself, it’s being seen liking something too much. Being seen practicing (judged to be imperfect). Being seen hoping your team might win the World Series and then being proven wrong (judged to, again, be imperfect). By this logic, coolness is supposed to be about playing to the gaze of everyone else, constantly calculating how that might land, and adjusting accordingly.
Dan wasn’t like that. Dan made it cool as hell to be excited about everything. He knew everything imaginable about Philly, he got excited about malls and bootleg T-shirts and basically anything, and he was one of the coolest people I knew. He could make you feel funnier and more interesting than you thought you were just by being so interested in things you said. It’s something that Amanda, another friend of mine, always did too—got excited about so much stuff, and about telling people about that stuff. The older I get, the more I realize how incredible this trait is in anyone: it makes everything else so bearable. It’s stupid as hell that neither of them are around to get excited about anything else.
It’s so corny, but I really do think that this is the way I will keep thinking about Dan for the rest of my life: to try to be more like him in this way. It’s just cool to love things. It’s cool to remember some guys. It’s cool to be hype about learning everything you can possibly learn so you can tell people about it. It’s cool to know more than anyone else about the city you live in. It’s cool to be, I guess, kind of cringe. Dan McQuade was cool as hell. I’ll miss him a lot.